100 Dimensions of a Security Officer in a Crisis Region, Part II

First Lessons

Before you get deployed, try to learn as much about a country or a region as possible.?

Gather information, from social media channels, TV, and newspapers and analyze them. Are they reliable? Objective? For which side do they write? Wake up your Points of Contact (POC) and establish new ones. Sounds a bit much, but you are not in the Army or the Police and you don’t have the different departments that supply you with all the necessary information you need. Sometimes you have very small departments that deal with information. The quality of information you get varies from good, usable, to unusable. Or simply it doesn’t cover the information you require at all.?

When you collect information, you also have to take a look at issues that are at the first sight not related to security.?

Economy, Geography, and Infrastructure

The economy is an underestimated topic. It gives you a base on which region is important for an invading country – what will be defended or attacked with higher priority. For an evacuation plan, for example, you can cross out some roads, because of the likelihood to drive in a fight.

Ukraine is a good example. About 80% of the economy is in the Donbas region. Oil and gas, the wheat chamber of Ukraine—not only for Ukraine but also for Africa and many other countries. Where are the oil, gas, metal, and manufacturing sites, the Nuclear Power Plants (Zaporizhzhia) about half of the reactors of Ukraine are located at this site, and the coal mines are also located in the Donbas. Additionally, there are important harbors, and don’t forget Sevastopol, one of the most important Navy ports of the Russian Federation in the black sea.

Last but not least you have a big amount of Ukrainian Defense Industries there and Titanium resources a rare metal, with very high demand all over the world. This explains very well why the fighting around this area is so intense. Ukraine needs this region for its economy, and for Russia, it is an extra income.?

For that reason these three issues are so important to know, and needed for a Security Risk Assessment (SRA)

History and Language?

These are two other things you need to learn about a country. The more you know about a country or a region, the easier you can estimate the seriousness of security issues. Sometimes incidents repeat or happen under certain situations (e.g. special holidays, religious celebrations, political events, …) If you know this, you can take action before it happens, and you can control or avoid the impact on your company/organization.

For this reason, I always advise you to learn the history of a country and don’t start one month before deployment or with 2014 in Ukraine. Go back at least 200 years. You don’t have to learn everything by heart. You just need a good overview.?

In a shortcut for Ukraine:

A not unimportant point is Kyiv is called??the origin of Russia. Kyiv played a very important role in Kyivan Ru's expansion to the east. This also depends on which side writes the history. The Russian version is a bit different. In this case, I stuck to the version of western historians.

The Influence of many cultures in Ukraine also shaped this country. But Ukraine was influenced by many conflicts over the centuries until it was controlled by the Russian Emperor and the small part in the west by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

After the fall of the Emperors, came the Soviet Union, with a really hard time of oppression. Stalin tried everything to suppress the freedom movement in Ukraine after bad harvesting seasons in 1932/1933 came the USSR's man-made famine/Terror-famine Holodomor that killed millions of Ukraine people. Ukraine became russification and the Ukrainian language was called a “dialect”, ….

There is no need to dig deeper into the history of Ukraine during the USSR, I guess everyone knows enough about this time.?

It is not a history lesson and I apologize if there are mistakes, but I would like to give you an example of how important it is to understand a nation. What are the driving forces, like mentality.

The second thing is the language, learn it fast for several reasons, especially when you are deployed/employed for a longer period.?

A Language opens doors and shows your interlocutor you are interested 
in the country. 
It also helps you to get the feeling of how a situation is during a 
negotiation – good, tense, critical, or a play with marked cards, but 
it might help you to understand whether your interpreter translated 
correctly. Might sound paranoid, but it is not. 
I will give you an example. In “Orange Country” we figured out some 
interpreters were not exactly translating what was spoken, and they 
changed some information on purpose and their translation did not 
deliver the exact cause of the incidents. The reasons for this were 
different. The main reasons were mostly other religion, ethnicity,
or other political views.        

I recommend to learn the language, to reach language level B 2 or C 1 as fast as possible.

Demographics, Mentality, and the People

After the sidestep into history you see, that field security interconnects with many issues that are at the first sight not important, but vital to evaluate risk. It is highly complex, compared to the fire safety evaluation of a big office building. In a crisis region, you need to know more, more experience is needed because you have tons of cross-links. In an office building, you have almost only hard facts. If you have to do an evacuation plan, you have a building plan with exact numbers. Which fire extinguisher system is used, where is the main entry point for the firefighters, where are the assembly points, and who is in charge of what, …

This makes it easy to draft an evacuation plan or a security concept.

In the previous abstract, you can see how important information is, only from this small excerpt from history to understand the mentality of the Ukrainian population.?

Simple examples of living a very long time under oppression that shape the mentality of a nation or nations.?

Oppression – Causes a strong desire for freedom, and we see this in the war in Ukraine.

Oppression – Population learned to live and to deal with it. Under the current situation, it is an big asset for the people in Ukraine, because the population can withstand difficult situations better. In these times, it makes Ukraine resilient and strong.

Follow orders, follow the mainstream, and don’t rebel against the authorities. These are the main points when people are under oppression.

This long period of Ukrainians living under oppression, made them mentally harder and they can endure difficult living conditions way better than we do in the west.?

Religion is a very important part of Ukrainian culture.?Additionally to religion and tensions among believers, you will find ethnic tensions, language tensions, politics get more extreme – patriotic/nationalistic. How tight or loose this issues are connected depends on the country or the conflict. Good example for this is the Balkans Region.

Local customs, holidays, or religious holidays are also important in many countries. A small incident on such a day can cause a huge blaze. In comparison, in Western Europe, hardly anyone would get upset about a small incident.

Get familiar with the local mentality. It differs from region to region, just think about your home country.

Politics is another big player when it is about mentality. What kind of political system did they have before? What kind of system do they have now? How did they like the old one and now the new one? This leads us back to, did they live under oppression or in freedom. Keep this in mind. People take something from the system into their mentality.?

People are usually very polite if you treat them with respect. I never had problems with that, even when I had to liaise with high-ranked commanders or authorities. Even when I had to drink their own distilled stuff, just make sure one stays sober, drives and knows what to do if a problem shows up. Of course, don’t finish yourself off ? and if you drink make it dependent on the state of alert!!

Alcohol can also be a part of their mentality. Play their game, you need information for your SRA, you need somebody who can help in a difficult situation, or you just liaise for good cooperation. Maybe it will become a friendship, but when it is about business, stay clear and impartial.?

This helped me already on different occasions and was very useful. Never forget, you are impartial, and you have to treat all different groups in the same way.?

Demographics are also an important issue that is very often neglected. This data gives you a good overview, of ethnicities, religions, languages, ages, wages, professions, average educational level, and minorities.?

Minorities are very regularly underestimated. You should figure out how they were treated before a crisis occurred. Liaison with minorities is important, but as I wrote before be nice, show respect, play their game, and stay impartial. A government frequently ignores minorities, this can have an impact from a foreign country, especially when tensions arise. For this reason, it is very useful to have good contacts with their spokespersons. You can operate or do business safely in the region if you keep good contact.

Mitigate and control the risks !!

Politics, Organized Crime, and Corruption?

Why did I put these three issues together? It is simple, and I had these issues in all the unstable countries I used to work.

These issues you will not only find in crisis/war regions. It can be countries that changed the political system, became independent, or suffered a war/civil war and tries to find a proper working political system. But it can also be a corruption mentality, this is unfortunately something that is found in many former Soviet Union countries. Some local people see this as just working around the system. Because they had to do it to make their living.

It was called?“Несун?-?Nesun”?in USSR a blue color crime, that was not considered a crime. A worker ?carries“?out something from the factory and it was not considered as stealing. The logic behind this was:?

?The government takes from us, so we must take from the government“?

It was an issue in all countries of the Soviet block. At least this I was told and read from different sources.

For others, it is an opportunity to earn money and for some, it is just greed.?

In this issue, I will stay focused on crisis/war regions. One of the problems in a crisis region is, there is usually no real functioning control system, and no proper stocktaking. Goods, and weapons are not listed exactly and are relatively simply distributed. The recipient simply accepts the goods, weapons, or money without signing it. There are no control authorities that cross-check the supply.?

This opens up many ways for corruption and organized crime. Weapons get lost, and the money vanishes in channels. Politicians give orders to close friends, that charge them four times the price for road construction with 8 cm tarmac, and “the friend” builds a road with 4 cm tarmac. This causes a repair order after 4 years instead of 10 years – we could call it profit optimization ?

This happens to almost all areas I mentioned before. Of course, weapons, money, goods, and food are the main targets for fraud and corruption. For this reason, we have to be very vigilant if the company or the organization gives orders to local companies or distributes humanitarian aid.?

Be aware not to interfere with the business of organized crime, militias, or armies. Be careful and conduct a proper screening before you work with somebody together.

Organized crime is its own topic, in a crisis region or an unstable country, OC finds a perfect breeding ground for its business. In such regions corruption has perfect conditions, the legal system is not fully implemented or not working. The tax system has a lot of holes, and if you have problems, they will get fixed within the ?family“, or with an extra cash payment.

You should also try to figure out, how the situation was before the crisis. Was OC already a big issue in the country? This will give you a good overview of how well the OC is situated in the country.?

This depends from country to country and in many crisis regions, you have instead of OC, ethnic groups, tribes, and warlords, …?

Basically, they work with a similar system to OC, but they operate more regional, while OC usually works across borders on bigger scales. These three things (politics, corruption, organized crime) are often very tight connected.?

If you work for an organization, you have to keep in mind, organizations work on many difficult??and some OC controlled tasks. This??tasks like Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), fight against poverty, support for a properly functioning legal and governmental system, human trafficking (prostitution, Bosnia was a good example), drugs, humanitarian aid, and many more. This opens up a huge amount of vulnerable points.?

We will come to this later again, and with issues for companies including Out of Bound Areas and the Code of Conduct, with recommendations when these regulations are violated.

Politics, Diplomacy, and comparison with other crisis regions

You have to know the political system. If a country calls itself Republic, or Democratic, does this not particularly mean it is a democratic country according to our western standards. Learn about the political parties, their leaders, and stakeholders. What are their goals? With whom do they ally? What is the mindset of a party leader? This gives you a good idea of how someone is likely to decide in a difficult situation and is an important basis for your risk assessment.?

Another important point is diplomacy. You are probably wondering why diplomacy is important when it comes to security – Simple explanation: You are in a crisis region or a country that is involved in a war. Many internal and external forces act on the country here.

The war on the ground can be the result of these internal and external forces. The geopolitical, economic, and strategic influences are vital keys to draft a SRA with foresight.?

It is helpful to know not only the military, but also the political ladder of escalation. They are very tightly connected.?

Therefore, I recommend studying the book ?Diplomacy“—Henry Kissinger.

The book is a good summary of the historical development of diplomacy and the various crises of the past century. Many crises/wars follow a similar pattern. It also shows the different approaches of different countries to foreign policy.

Although the book dates from 1994, the problems of today were outlined at that time.?

The US, Europe, Russia, China, and India have an imbalance of power.

Apart from the book, anyone who has been in crisis areas for a long time and has dealt intensively with the difficulties in these regions will recognize parallels.

Coming up next…?

HEAT and the problems, Boots/Shoes on the Ground, ……